A Companion Roman Religion - Spiritual Minds

of much that is only hinted at in earlier evidence concerning the organization of
Jewish life within, and the participation of Jews in the institutions of, the pagan
(and later, Christian) cities of the Greco-Roman Diaspora. Conveniently, each edict
is referenced by the Roman codes by calendrical date, the emperor(s) promulgating
the edict, and the Roman authority to whom the edict is directed for implementa-
tion. And while the codifiers undoubtedly made errors – sometimes with respect to
dates, sometimes in conflating more than one edict – the chronology is accurate enough
for our purposes. The principal sources for the 64 legal edicts concerning Jews
and Judaism are the Code of Theodosius II(438 ce) and its associated Novelsand
Interpretatio(end of the fifth century), the Code of Justinian(534 ce) and the
associated Digest(533 ce), and the Breviariumof Alaric II (506 ce) (see Linder
1987: 27–53).

New Testament and patristic writings

Early Christian sources, both New Testament (latter half of the first century ceand
early second century) and patristic writings (early second century ceand beyond),
provide a wealth of information about Jews and Judaism in the Greco-Roman Diaspora,
notwithstanding their own tendentiousness in dealing with Jews and Jewish institu-
tions, the archetypical “other” for most early Christian authors.

Writings of the early rabbis

The writings of the early rabbis, a religio-professional guild that emerged in the Jewish
community of late second-century Palestine, also proffer information about Jewish
life and Judaism in “Mediterranean provinces,” namely, the lands of the Roman
Mediterranean outside of Palestine. However, the relevant passages in rabbinic lit-
erature (turn of the third century ce through the late sixth or the turn of the
seventh centuries) are decidedly episodic and usually rabbi-centric; that is to say, early
rabbis assume (or presume) a prominence and authority in these Diaspora com-
munities, an authority which no evidence corroborates (see Levine 1998a: 98 –138).

Biblical literature

As mentioned, Greco-Roman Diaspora Jews possessed and revered (Jewish) biblical
literature (which they read and studied in Greek); they possessed as well an expan-
sive supplementary set of documents which the church later collected in what it came
to call the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. These texts shaped
the Diaspora Jews’ perceptions and social constructions of their reality, and proffered
authoritative norms, laws, religious rites, and festivals, which had to be adapted to
Diaspora settings, but which they could not ignore (see Sanders 1999: 5).

Imagining (Greco-)Roman Diaspora Jews and Judaism:

conceptual and theoretical issues

Evidence does not select and organize itself. Nor does evidence interpret itself. For
any phenomenon studied our prior notions of how phenomena such as this one work

Roman Diaspora Judaism 351